Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are absolutely committed to working closely with young people to get them back to work and help them do that. We will, therefore, have the Pathways to Work strategy and I will be launching that early next year. We will significantly ramp up the number of places available on training and employment support schemes. There will be 35,000 extra training places and 10,000 new apprenticeships. That is being led by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, and as I said earlier, funding was secured as part of the July stimulus.

The public employment service, which covers the spectrum of services, including local employment service, JobPath, job clubs and employability service, which is focused on helping people with disabilities get into the work force, has a current capacity between all those services to deal with a total caseload of approximately 106,000 people. I want to increase that capacity by about 87,000 to bring it up to around 193,000. We will, therefore, be ramping up the capacity of the local employment services next year.

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